Founded by the Romans, Exeter flourished through its strategic location on the River Exe, which provided ready access to both the English Channel and most of Devon. Probably England’s fourth largest provincial town at the start of the seventeenth century, with a population of around 9,000, it played host to the Devon assizes and Admiralty court, while its cathedral served a diocese covering both Devon and Cornwall. W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640, pp. 6, 8; P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500-1700, p.

Described by Thomas Fuller in 1662 as a county ‘perfect in profit and pleasure’,Fuller’s Worthies ed. R. Barber, 36. Berkshire in the early seventeenth century was one of the wealthiest shires in England, as well as being one of the smallest. It owed its prosperity primarily to the fertility of its two principal agricultural districts, the Vale of White Horse, in the north, and the Vale of Kennet, in the south; the cloth industry centred on Reading and Newbury, so vigorous in the sixteenth century, was badly affected by the trade depression of the 1620s.

The market town of Arundel, in west Sussex, grew up at the lowest point that the river Arun could be bridged. According to a visitor in the 1630s it was ‘relieved with a convenient pretty haven, and graced with an ancient, strong and stately castle’. VCH Suss. v. pt. 1, p. 10; ‘Relation of a Short Survey of the Western Counties’ ed. L.G. Wickham Legg Cam. Misc. xvi (Cam. Soc. ser. 3. lii), pt. 3, p. 30. Despite a lack of social amenities, relatively good communications made it the regular venue for the West Sussex Epiphany sessions. A.

Monmouthshire was created in 1536 by joining the ancient kingdom of Gwent with the cantref of Gwynll?g. The new shire had an anomalous position, however, for although omitted from the jurisdiction of the Welsh Great Sessions courts, placed in the Oxford assize circuit and given two county Members in Parliament like other English counties, it was culturally and linguistically still very much Welsh in character, and many contemporaries continued to consider it part of Wales. A. Clark, Story of Mon. i. 133-4; Law and Disorder in Tudor Mon. ed. B. Howell, pp.

Caernarvonshire is divided into three by the massif of Mount Snowdon: to the east, the Creuddyn peninsula and the Conway valley; Arfon and Arllechwedd Isaf along the Menai Strait to the north; and Eifionydd and the Llŷn peninsula to the south and west. During the early modern period the shire’s economy was of the conventional upland type, mixing subsistence crops of rye and barley with the commercial farming of livestock, a combination which left the freeholders’ ability to meet tax demands heavily dependent upon the state of the cattle trade.

The notoriously bad Wealden roads meant that Sussex was more isolated from London than its geographical proximity would suggest and ensured that the assizes were usually held at East Grinstead, near the Surrey border. For most administrative purposes the county was divided between its eastern and western parts.

The West Sussex market town of Midhurst, situated 11 miles north of Chichester, was an ancient but unincorporated borough, ownership of which was attached to the adjacent manor of Cowdray. It was governed by a bailiff, who was elected by the burgage-holders, seven of whom also enjoyed the right to collect the market tolls and appoint the steward of the borough’s manorial court. The borough first returned Members of Parliament in 1301, but was only consistently represented from 1382.

Founded in 1284 and enlarged in 1541, Flintshire returned a knight of the shire and a burgess to Parliament from 1542. R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063-1415, pp. 364-5; SR, iii. 849. Although one of the smallest counties in Wales, it was among the least mountainous, and its population, perhaps 20,000 in 1600, was larger than that of Merioneth, Anglesey or Radnor. L.E. Owen, ‘Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), pp.

Probably founded by the Normans in about 1090, Caer yn Arfon [the fort in Arfon cantref] quickly reverted to Welsh control until its capture by Edward I, whose heir, the first Plantagenet prince of Wales, was born there in 1284. In the same year the Statute of Rhuddlan established the new town as the administrative centre of the principality of North Wales; hence Sir John Wynn’s† description of the inhabitants as ‘the lawyers of Caernarvon’. Afer a slow start, the town grew under the Tudors, having a population of perhaps 1,000 in 1600.

Sited at the eastern end of the Menai straits, Beaumaris was the last of the Welsh fortresses to be founded by Edward I. Sacked and then captured by Owen Glynd?r in 1403-5, it was quickly repaired. By the sixteenth century the borough, which commanded ‘a fair, safe, and capacious haven and road’, had become the main port on the north coast of Wales, trading with Lancashire for grain, general merchandise from Chester and salt and wine from France, Ireland and Scotland.I. Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, 78-80; E.A. Lewis, Medieval Bors. Snowdonia, 204, 206; L.